During orthopedic surgery, a surgeon trims a pathological part of the bone and replaces the pathological part with an implant. Two major factors influence the eventual outcome of a bone surgery—the ability of a surgeon to accurately remove the pathological bone segment while keeping the healthy bone intact and the ability of the surgeon to replace the pathological bone segment with an optimally matched implant. For performing the surgery with minimal incision, the bone is trimmed with the aid of a patient specific cutting guide. The guide contains one or more saw-slots and some landmarks for accurately performing the reference cuts. In the surgical planning phase, the personalized cutting guide is designed, and a surgical plan that exploits the reference cuts and any other cuts to define optimal placement of a surgical implant is created by the surgeon and a designer. The plan then guides a surgeon in placement of the implant after performing the initial cuts on the bone.
The design of the patient specific cutting guide and the construction of the surgical plan are carried out in the planning phase by experienced designers. For this purpose, the designers follow a set of operations defined in pre-approved work instructions. In most cases, the surgical planning procedure is pre-approved by a regulatory body, and the designers have to strictly follow the rules specified in the approved procedure. To this end, the designers of the cutting guide rely on interactive, yet-manual, 3D modeling software to create the cutting guide. However, this manual design process results in increased design time, lack of repeatability, reduced consistency, and a potential for unintentional deviation from the pre-approved procedure.